This may sound like a foolish thing, but I wasn’t afraid. Serra wasn’t either, she stood defiantly in the middle of the room, as though there was nothing in this world that could move her. She says, “try to keep up.” Then she sprung forward, the force of which made the Cicada dip slightly, she struck the door with enough force to rip it completely off it’s reinforced hinges, and rode it right into the side of the police cruiser that had it’s guns aimed and ready to fire, the magnetic lock cable it had anchored to us to halt our movement snapped off with ease, whipping back into it’s reel. The moment she struck it, she used her momentum to leap to the side and out of sight. The way she moved, the force of the impact as she hits the police cruiser, sending it spiraling off towards the ground. It looked ridiculous, spiraling away like that, it’s black gunmetal shape almost giving the impression that it were a large fly that had just been swatted away.
Cyborg. Probably high-level bionics. Military grade muscle fiber interlaced with a skeletal support system. Probably bone density supplements and nano-fiber. Definitely had spinal grafts, maybe titanium plating. Judging from the force she knocked that door off, I’d say she had the same treatment for her arms that she had for her legs. As a matter of fact I wouldn’t be surprised if she had an artificial body, but that seemed unlikely. Her touch was too warm, she still had human emotions. Something about taking the leap from human to bio machine did strange things to people. In my limited experience of it and what I’ve seen, the top police officers and some of the private security guys that go through the process lose their humanity in the process. They were perpetually on the net, never tired, never seemed to give a damn about anything. An emotional no-man’s land. Not her though. To be honest, I had expected to have been popped off by now. I confessed everything to her, not really out of trust, but because I thought that I was going to be executed any moment so I didn’t see much point in hiding anything. She said she was my bodyguard, and I laughed in her face. What a fool I was, she really is an army unto herself.
That’s when a more dangerous notion wormed it’s way into my head. I began to have a little bit of hope. It happened so fast, like a lightning striking, that I couldn’t stop myself. Once one begins to hope all sorts of insane ideas begin to gestate in one’s head. Ideas of escape, survival, even victory. In my experience hope was something that happened to other people, I never dared tamper with the stuff. That way I was never let down too bad.
Cicadas were piloted with an old control stick setup. Like you see in the ruined sectors of Europa, hovering around from landing to landing, scavenging old tech and fuel. There was a pain that resonated from the back of my head. Then what sounded like someone took an old circuit board and put it in a microwave. Then a flood of memories, reality and dream seeming to blend together in that moment. Zombie-like I wandered over to the control panel and pressed the manual override. With the magnetic lockdown the police cruiser Serra destroyed was placing on us gone, I could get the ship moving again. Outside I was half seeing, through the cockpit window, Serra holding on to the railgun mounted on the top of another police cruiser, and shadows of the past. The conflicting vision was of me piloting a helicopter away from a corporate strike team, you could see the logos on their body armor shinning brightly amidst the snow. They were firing up at me, but more to get my attention then to try and shoot me down, I must have left them behind. The image faded, but I found for a second I could think about it free of pain.
With one fluid motion she ripped the railgun off, sending a shower of sparks into the air. Then she threw it through the windshield of a third police cruiser that had come from between two buildings, which, as a result, erupted into a massive fireball before scraping the side of a nearby tower, disappearing from view. With a few well-placed punches that clearly rattled the other ship, she managed to puncture a hole into the roof and climb inside.
My ship shook violently, at the same time a bluish fireball passed between me and controls. Seeing the futility in trying to stop Serra they had switched back to their main target it seems. Memory tells me that a Cicada has much better handling then the tub I piloted prior to this, it was a pre-war Russian Ivanov, a clunky transport that moved with all the grace of a flying one-winged dung beetle. If you aimed the thrusters one way, and pushed another you could evade almost anything. The only drawback was that when you did that you were probably going to crash before you regained control, in other words it was a desperation maneuver. There was a buzzing in my ear, mild pain, but I could work through it. It wasn’t as bad as usual. Judging from the direction the shot came from they were on my left, and that was probably the warning shot since they had not decided to go full-auto on the first run. From what it seems Serra’s Cicada lacked any sort of defensive weaponry, aside from her. That leaves me with one option.
Ahead the other ship was being torn apart from the inside out, as various pieces of the ship began to fly off raining down on the streets below. I had my own problems to deal with. I punched the console, and diverted all power to the thrusters on the right side of the ship, then jerked left slamming into the police vessel next to me so hard that I managed to knock both of us through the building next to us. Sparks flew, warning lights blinked, and I braced for impact. The Cicada tumbled through what looked like a run-down sky mall, before sliding upside down to a stop next to a fountain The police’s ship was impaled into one of the massive support columns, it was on fire. There was no movement from inside. There was more pain, from inside my head, from my neck and back after being thrown upside down, reality and dream began to blur again. Groggy, my head was on fire, it was burning up from the inside. Crawling now, crawling out the hole Serra tore in the side of the Cicada. Outside, I claw at the side of the ship to pull myself up. Leaning against the side of it my head was spinning. There was a gun in my face, backup.
Stumbling, dizzy, drunk with pain. Disarming a man is easy, the average time for someone to react before firing is about two seconds, trained, maybe one. You grab the top of their wrist, jerk their arm to the side so that if they do think to fire they miss you or at least fail to hit any vital organs. A round cuts through my right arm. Then their arm gets twisted, jerked to the side and around the back so that I’m in control of his body from the back. Hammerlock, there are more, but it’s blurry hard to see them clearly, logic tells me that they are going to start firing like crazy, right about … now. The guy in the lock is screaming for them not to shoot, but they don’t care. As the shots rain on his body, his armor probably prevents most of the rounds from piercing through him, but the force is more than enough to shatter bones, making death slow and painful. His grip on the gun is released before this, and I have it, using him as a human shield I do what is instinctive, you can’t shoot over or around a body too easy to get picked off. What I do is fall to the ground, shoot at their legs, probably no armor there. Pay dirt, one goes down firing wildly into the air, a second shot hits him in the throat. The other I miss, with the first shots, but doesn’t react fast enough to avoid the second, a round pierces him through the eye. Seifer’s boys aren’t doing so hot tonight. Neither am I.. The pain in my arm is nothing compared to the pain in my head. Shadows of the past, the gunfight feels familiar. Everything feels more familiar when I’m surrounded by violence and death. It’s like coming home.
More backup, two cruisers cut through the open spaces of the abandoned mall, kicking up old merchandise, trash, and old fliers. These are the big ones, the kinda that carry full auto coilguns, Auto Gauss. It’s a blur, my head is throbbing, and they get within firing range of me before a shock-wave knocks over a nearby support column and the roof promptly falls in on them. I collapse back against the Cicada, unable to focus on anything. Serra’s there after what seems like an eternity, she’s saying that I need to ride the pain. Now’s the time, she says. They can’t operate under the continued strain of trying to suppress my memories. To break them I have to fight it, I have to dive headlong into the pain and force myself to remember. What I wanted was to find out my past, and go back to the way things were. A comfortable life, information at my fingertips, retirement. I didn’t want to be going through assassination attempt after assassination attempt being led around the city by some insane cyborg. This is not what I signed up for, and now it was too late. No, I tell myself, it was too late the moment you trusted Seifer, and revealed to him what your intentions were. There’s no going back, the only way out is through this. Through the pain and fear and violence of a world gone mad, and if I was to make any sense of it I’d have to face whatever is lurking in the dark recesses of my mind.
The pain is just a wall, a barrier of sound meant to keep me out. Visualize the wall now, with cracks in it, from years of blocking my attempts to break through. The cracks go wide, the holes go deep, it’s not strong anymore. My head is screaming, my vision goes black from the torment. I keep picturing the wall, and there’s a hole in it that goes through the other side, right in the center. Things leak out in small bursts. I’m holding a machine gun and firing down from some rooftop then it’s gone replaced by a beautiful blonde girl in a teal dress. She’s in the rain and then there’s fire and rubble. There’s more coming now, and my image of the wall was wrong. A wall is a structure meant to divide two places, to show boundaries. This was a dam. Behind the accumulated years of experience and knowledge were pressing down on it with such force that it was cracking, not from my attempts to break through, but all on their own. It was the damage from trying to hold back a force of nature, like gravity. The pain was making me hallucinate, see things in visual metaphors, like some fitful dream that I could not understand fully or escape. The one thing I did understand though was that the dam was breaking, and when it did the pain would be washed away, and then my past would be accessible to me, which filled me with some dread, and anticipation, but most longing. A deep seeded desire to just know, good or bad.
Staggering up, Serra helps me up, and I feel like a child in the hands of his mother, small and light. Her strength is astonishing. I say to her, ‘let’s get out of here.’ She just nods. My head still hurt, the pain was now a buzzing that was near constant, but it wasn’t like it was before. It had grown weaker, less powerful, with each push I made to think about and expand upon the existing memories I had experienced the pain would get weaker, easier to ignore. Serra said nothing, we walked past a giant hole in the floor, from where the ceiling caved in on the police. She says to me, “The cops sprung a trap, someone didn’t want them here We’ve got to be more careful, we got by on luck tonight. If you die then this will all have been for nothing.”
Still protecting me, thinking only of me. That brought a feeling of shame, for this woman has done enough for me already, but she won’t stop. You could tell just by looking at her. Like my desire to remember, she shares a passion for protecting me. It seems strange to be able to trust anyone, to survive in this society one almost has to have a total detachment from everyone. The more people there are, the less there is for everyone to have. The more they fight, wrapped up in day to day concerns. That’s just at the street level, higher up it’s fights over money. Endless fights over money and whatever resources are available. With all that conflict the ability to trust anyone is eroded. When you know the guy next to you would kill you if it came down to something as simple as a promotion or a few thousand dollars, EF credits, whatever currency you like, it’s hard to not show anything by a steely front. Yet, behind it all there has to be a fear, something that keeps the majority of people from daring to show weakness. A fear of poverty and death. For, in the Commission’s cities the two are almost indistinguishable. That’s how they like it, that’s how the whole thing was designed when it was thought out. They made the prospect of poverty so frightening and dangerous to one’s health that people would do anything to keep from living down in the slums. The old toxic waste parts of town, the financial refugee camps that exist deep in the old underground. Those places are a dreadful fate to anyone who hasn’t been raised there. Though a sort of economic oppression the Commission successfully done away with the need to threaten people, or punish the few non-conformists that pop up. All they have to do is screw their credit, send them down to the underground. So instead of fearing the place, they fear things that lead to ending up there. A fear that manifests itself in day to day worries that place a constant pressure on people. Fear of not trying to peruse wealth, of doing something to displease your employer, of failing to maintain a proper level of debt, of failing to purchase expensive products, of not buying enough from your employer, or even worse, spending your paycheck at a competitor’s place. They’ve turned people in on themselves, making them so afraid that they’ll do whatever it takes to maintain the status-quo because the alternative is something utterly detestable. So you can’t trust people, you don’t know which fear has got a hold of them, what they’ll use you for or do to you just to get a promotion or to earn some cash. In the Commission the one and only goal for society in general is to make as much money as possible, no matter what. Serra was something rare, a person who didn’t want to use anyone. Someone that I could trust, and in times like these, that made all the difference. That’s when it began to sink in with me just how much I have come to depend on her in such a short period of time.
We walk past abandoned kiosks and old stores, their neon signs flickering and fading. The ceiling has tall angular windows that stretch upwards for some time before intersecting. The way that you’d imagine the old churches and cathedrals looked, open and somewhat ominous. A place to murmur in quiet prayer and hope that maybe after all that you’ll get called on up to Heaven. In some ways, there’s little difference between the two. People came here seeking relief, buying things, new things, rampant materialism, that’s the new religion. Malls packed like temples, filled with teeming masses of people wandering around looking for the next big thing to keep them preoccupied and complacent. The alternative was to think about how irrevocably screwed they were, how little control they really had over their own lives, and about the price you would pay if you tried to do anything about it. All these feelings, which you gathered from the desperation and the fronts people put up, were familiar. As we continued through the area, people started coming out of the woodwork, probably wanting to lay low when the cops were tearing ass through here. The place wasn’t abandoned, it pulsed with it’s own secret life. Monitors turned on, figures wearing logo-suits and Hipware came out. Neon replaced the near-total darkness. Some figures stood around, armed with low-tech weaponry… one guy was even wearing a sword. One of the newer filament blades, that use thin wires that usually carry current as well. Total overkill, like a person is going to really respond to being electrocuted when you’ve cut them in half. That’s probably be the least of their concerns. Custom street tech, I knew this because my memories were returning, and the streets felt like home. It was odd, just three days ago I was living in a highrise, I had it all but was totally miserable. At this moment I should probably be the most concerned. The police were, at this point probably trying to actively kill me, all my accounts were wiped, and the future… well actually that’s something that I shouldn’t concern myself with. The prospects are unpleasant. At times like this, I’ve learned that it’s best to just go with the flow and try to stay off the radar. The Commission is less likely to go after a person who goes underground and gets out of the way, doesn’t make waves. For now that’s probably my best bet, it’s the only option really.
Still slightly dizzy, my head throbbing, but I was thinking clear enough to attempt some sort of conversation; however, just before I could do so one of the nearby monitors distracted me. It was a news feed using a simulated voice of a young female. They found through market research this was the most pleasing voice to use for delivering bad news, and that it was generally easier to get a computer to say what you wanted without questioning it than a human. In relative terms what I did was the exception to this rule, as to why, well I only had guesses at this point. The monitor was displaying the government district bombing, with market prices, breaking news, an advertisement, current sports scores, current exchange rates, and the latest number one books and music singles, all designed to bombard the viewer with so much information that they cannot place their full attention on what they are being told. All designed in an attempt to keep them confused and clueless. Yeah they’ll have heard the report, but if you were to ask the average person who watched it to give you the details they probably couldn’t. Over this the voice was saying, “The President was not home at the time of the bombing, and his Circa was found on a nearby catch plate.” The small window in the middle of all the various data feeds showed a picture of my wrecked Circa. “He was taken by an unidentified individual from the site of the crash presumed to be female, this was before the police could interrogate him for possible connections to the bombing itself. This was several days ago. There is new data that the police are just now sending through on the feeds that the President has resisted arrest, killing multiple service men with a group of well-trained paramilitary bodyguards before disappearing into the deregulated zone’s shopping district. A possible motivation for the bombings may have something to do with President Adamus’ near 0% approval rating.” For some reason, all of this fails to surprise me.
Serra puts her hand on my back, and says with a dark edge, “Well, like it or not, your approval rating is going up.” I stifle a chuckle, she doesn’t. At times like these, I guess all you can do is laugh. It’s all a great comedy, a joke. It has to be, because the reality that this is happening seems ridiculous.
The reporter doesn’t get the joke. “The President cleared all the government accounts and with a small group seems to have stolen a majority of the money that he was allotted as per his contract with tech giant Demer Corp. Recent information released by John Seifer, head of the metro police department’s Corporate Crime division, claims that in meetings he had with the president he became increasingly suspicious that the President was opposed to the progress and relative prosperity that Capitalism has afforded the citizens of The Commission, and had designs to subvert the system by any means possible.” An audio file begins to play, it’s my voice and I’m saying, “I’d do anything to get back at these people, whoever is behind this big coverup…”
They cut me off there. They don’t play the last words of the sentence, so I say them out loud so Serra can hear, “that seems to revolve around any information regarding my past.”
She says, “What do you expect? Objectivity in your journalism? Gotta please the sponsors, don’t want to upset anyone that matters, after all.” There is more than a little hint of bitterness in her voice.
News feed cuts off, because someone throws a rock at the wafer screen, knocking it from it’s mounting. Security, including our boy with the blade, drags him off. The man, dressed in layers of old logo-wear jackets is yelling something about how no one here needs to be listening to this ‘bullshit.’ Just when I start thinking to myself, ‘at least some people get it.’ He says it’s all bullshit, it’s all them aliens in control of everything, trying to experiment on us. He says they put nano in your blood to monitor you from space. The security guys grumble to themselves about how this is the fifth time this week, and they need to make an example of the guy. He’s still yelling about aliens when they drag him into an abandoned service hallway, Serra motions for me to follow her. Inside it’s a little darker, hard to see. They say to the old man, how they are sick of his crazy little stunts, that they are gonna bust him up good so he won’t bother them anymore. Serra grabs one of them by the shoulder and spins him around, greeting him with an uppercut that sends him flying backwards and up about fifteen feet into a nearby wall. The other guy, Mister Blade, tries to make a run for it. A stiff clothesline from me sends him into a cartwheel that ends with his head cracking against the ground with a sickening thud. No thanks from the old man, who only continues stuttering about alien bio-tech in his pants, before wandering off. Then we’re out and moving back down the now-crowded shopping district. Rife with vagrancy, some are just standing in front of the various wafer screens and holo-arrays that seem to pepper the area, like media machine gun fire giving vague information and overloading people with commercials. No one seemed to know what to do really. We walk through the area heading off to another safe house no doubt. With Serra’s ability to remain totally conspicuous she probably had safe houses all over the city, to lay low and plan her lightning strikes on corporate interests before disappearing into the maze-like underbelly of the decaying portions of the city. Places that they had used up and left to rot, without jobs or opportunities, where people had to fend for themselves. A woman next to me buys a new Hipside, with a new processor and wireless internet jacks. She looks malnourished and sickly, but she clutches the box and sheds a tear of joy as the smiling shopkeeper takes her money. A little girl sits at the corner, he head shaved, two data jacks on the side of her head plugged in while a man, presumably her father or guardian hits on two female clerks at a worn-out looking used clothing outlet, the sign for the old shoe chain that used to be in it’s place still glowing it’s defiant red, as though it objects to the occupation of unfamiliar goods. Nearby a group of men come and begin to disassemble a shop while the keeper screams at them to go away, one of them pulls a piece and points it at the clerk, who then just sits there while the men haul everything away. A fight over a food bill at a nearby shop has two men rolling around on the ground, people crowded around and cheering. We turn a corner to a less crowded section, and Serra says, “Do you know how things got this bad?”
I admit that The Commission only told me that the old government became an extension of corporate interests. The details eluded me.
“That’s close to it. The old government became massively in debt due largely to hubris. They felt that they were the best, the greatest place in the world, so great in fact that they could teach others how to be great like them, and if they didn’t listen they’d simply bomb them into submission. By being provoked into wars based not upon necessity but politics and trying to project an appearance of power they actually did nothing but damage their infrastructure so thoroughly that they ignored the corporations becoming increasingly ingrained in the various governmental bodies. The government needed corporate sponsorship to fund the wars, they’d bid out obscene amounts of money to various weapons manufacturers, rather than producing the tech themselves, which racked up the costs and led to corporations being able to get closer on the inside of national politics. The wars ended up becoming increasingly costly, both in lives and income, and they needed to keep finding new enemies to fight to keep the public distracted and in fear so that they didn’t question the wholesale buyout of government by corporate interests. The wars were failures, mostly because there was little justification for invasion in most cases, and no real plan, except to make those in power look competent and in-charge of the world. Politicians were making military decisions in some sort of inept attempt at trying to improve their public image and re-election chances. In the end they simply ran out of money, so the corporations offered to start sending merc forces to ‘help’ the army maintain it’s occupation of various countries, as the line began to blur between this new corporate ‘army’ and the dwindling government army, they now had the country in their debt and had the military mostly under their control. When the various defense and media companies, who for years had been supporting the wars, came in and decided to collect on the bill, the government had no choice but to hand over the control to corporate panels who slowly wrested power from them by keeping them in the dark of the war’s progress and events. They just moved in and took over. Then the wars ended, as they were no longer profitable, and most of the invaded regions collapsed into infighting, which is not much of a difference from what they were doing before. The government could do nothing but capitulate further and further to the demands of the corporations, whom without, no one could get elected, and no government services could run because they were so far in debt to them. They needed the corporations more then they needed them. So the next step was obvious, and this is the result. That was the real Dream that they were chasing, total economic domination. Whoever controls the wealth, controls the power. They treated the government like a competitor, indulged their excess and even encouraged it, till it ran them into the ground. Then they took the scraps and chopped it up and sold it wholesale to whoever was buying. It was the biggest and most impressive hostile takeover in history.”
We walked in silence, after that, my head pounding. Serra’s explanation made sense, but didn’t leave me with any sort of satisfaction that knowledge usually brings, but a lot of questions. A lot of anger.
Seeing her words had troubled me, mostly with something new to consider on top of everything. She says, “I’m sorry, the only reason I told you that was to provide a context. History is good for that, without knowing what happened to lead to the way things are, we’re blind to strike against them.”
“Strike against them, you’re kidding right?”
“I’d never kid you, you’re the President. It’s time people started treating you like it.”
“Please, I’m just a puppet, always have been. At this moment, maybe just a dead man walking. Right now I’m just trying to make sense of what’s going on. I mean, all that stuff that happened in the past, it’s terrible, but we can’t keep looking backwards to what decisions a bunch of greedy old fools made. Whatever happened it doesn’t change the fact that what’s going on is wrong. Yet, we can’t worry ourselves with every detail, and get bogged down with every injustice, we should focus on only the things that we can conceivably change.”
She seemed to consider my words, then said, “well the only thing we can do is wait for your memory to return, I can keep you safe till then possibly. We’ll have to keep a very low profile for a while.”
“I agree, besides… why should we constantly be burdened with the bad decisions people in the past made? I mean they’re dead, and we’re still fighting their ghosts, the specters of their short-sighted arrogance, who have possessed the collective conscious of generations.”
“Because their bad decisions have led to a generation that wants you dead! Stop trying to make excuses to not hold these people accountable for what they’ve done to you.”
“I’m not making excuses, I’m just trying to avoid making foolish and rash decisions that are just going to end with me getting killed and nothing changing, just because I’m pissed off at the world in general. I don’t see why they even bother with me.”
“They thought enough of you to lie about you on the news feeds, which means in some small way they fear you. That means the knowledge you possess must be a threat to them. Your nanos are supposed to cease functioning any time now. They aren’t supposed to operate at full capacity after nine years, it’s been almost ten. I don’t know what will happen to your state of mind when they break down, but you may experience some very vivid dream-like events. I’ve seen you kinda disconnect at times, like you see something not quite there.”
We reach a freight elevator, it’s in an even more empty side-alley inside a slightly-more decayed section of the shopping district. On the way down I look over at Serra, who seems to be lost in thought.
“I hate it, too.”
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